COCYTUS DEFROSTED

Through these projections I summon you
Through the drawing of these lines I bind you
To the world in the west and the knot of night
Let your poison corrode the sun
Let your dark water dissolve its central seat of power
Free the palace of light from its commanding mass

COCYTUS DEFROSTED
Peter Grey

A great thermocline inversion places Satan entombed in a hell of ice. The angelic descent has made an impact crater whose unexploded ordinance is wedged, a nail of star iron, in the heart of the earth; a vision stolen from Islam, a solution to the problem of elements in conflict. A crystal intricacy of underworld has grown around that conceit in the secret caverns, and is brightly enamelled with a history of famous misdeeds. These are, in turn, enamelled in ice. At the nadir, Brutus, Cassius and Judas are devoured for their crimes against Caesar, State and Christ by the dread protagonist sunk to his waist, iron set in iron ground. Here is the indivisible trinity of Empire, trapped in an act of magic whose concentric locks are soldered frozen. The enemy does the work of the overlord, guarantees his ascendance. The power to torture, to consume, is shown as the ultimate sacrament of God’s love. It is a prison of permafrost reliant on a fatal seed of fire.

Yet we are not so certain in our schematics, so trusting of any guide, so sure that there will be binary retribution. We feel the pulse of melt water even beneath our own skin. The cantos of Dante dramatically crack and calve into rising seas and inchoate chaos. The black sun, the seed of fire that Dante’s schema is arrayed about is the engine of violent change. The world is being reshaped one degree at a time. The prison spews forth its renditioned denizens; a Bastille, a Charenton, a black site liberated at whatever the cost.

It is nature, and the great processes of nature that Dante as conjuror cannot restrain. We must therefore seek a new organic poetics that accounts for the violence of transformation, the instability of category and the contagion of exchange. We cannot expect straight answers, we need slant strategies. Against Dante’s spoiled colour and strata that heaves into geological disorder, we need sorcery, the art that transgresses boundaries, which sees the potential in that dynamism and does not shy from what it wreaks upon us all. It is only a nocturnal art that can creep into the violated catacombs, explore the architecture of the bunker necropolis upon which the city and civilisation has been built.

Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert follow a path of katabasis; shadow, silt, and specks of light descending into the underworld. It is a descent that is verboten in a culture of surfaces, where the bright simulacra of consumer goods has no visible cost. In stark contrast, their palette is patiently ground from a mineral subterranean strata, yet it both glitters and compels, cannot be touched, and touches our unknown interiors. There is a profound sense of gratitude for the discovery of what we thought was lost but is the ephemeral and eternal mystery couched within the earth and in the labyrinth of our own bodies.

We are enfolded in their work, and, as our eyes adjust to the darkness, we begin to inhabit a place where time, flows and awareness are initially disrupted but then assume a new coherence. The hierarchy of the senses, overstimulated by the demands of the digital — which excludes all introversion, all contemplation — return to an older order. It is in a return to a world without humans, before humans, of geological time and mythic time, that a profound healing seeps over us. The eye turns inward and the dark senses feel their way through space. Mollusc sense, spider sense, bat sense, snake sense stir and a sublime synesthesia engulfs us. But the work does not end there, we gain virus sense, root sense, rock sense, as the divisions between animate and supposedly dead matter are revealed as arbitrary mistakes of perception.

Here is their Virgil, a hawser of spider silk under dramatic tension. Now snapped free and gesticulating endlessly expressively into the darkness, now as pendulum under a droplet weight. Examined minutely, discarded, brought back. We ourselves plunge deeper into the inferno drawn on by our fascination for the other side of being through solid rock, and along fine river tributary capilliaries. The mystery of Dante is the mystery of the body which does not end where we expect it to, but extends to infinity. The body is lost to the cave, and the realisation that there are no boundaries, or borders.

There are no names of great men written here, not even human ghosts; the patience of a lens pressed against the impassive ice reveals a world that is emergent, chaotic and purposive. In the absence of text, of biological life as we would expect it, is another form of life found in sabbatic frenzy. Here is the world without us, a confrontation with non-human intelligences that can only be termed demonic, given their turbulent and virulent excess. We are confronted with the forces that have made and unmake men; it is a secret world that we are privileged to enter.

The cold the discomfort the solitude and stillness of the cave speaks without words:

We have been here before.

The moment that we have entered into is one of first creation, the state out of time and being where raw matter is at it’s most creative and therefore most terrifying. The individual as bounded, created, finished, cannot exist here. It is not the world of God the Father, but of the unnamed and unnumbered. The revelation is one of extasis and pure horror. Morality is absent, motion has milled the stars themselves to dust. If you had lungs you would suffocate, if you had limbs they would be torn from you in a sparagmos of subatomic maenads, if you had volition or will it is subsumed to a storm that knows no horizon. You are not observing a work but participating in a ritual action that engulfs and destroys the observer. You are lost, obliterated. The artists are obscured in the act of making the darkness visible, and in absenting themselves allow the absenting of our particular humanity. They bring us all into the ur-state. Identity is removed, we are removed, at one with the galaxial vortex of motes.

It is only at such a primal level that renewal can occur, and this is the secret of the artistic tradition. So Dante descends the perilous stairs for his appointment with the chimeric enemy and provides us with allegory. Austin Osman Spare, surrounded by the stink of feral cats and poverty, knots into death posture and draws forth the atavistic smoke of fleshy forms. Picasso meets his mask at Lascaux, the only sanctuary left after Guernica. The hybridity of animal and human is shown as a record of what has been seen, is behind the carefully crafted image. The sorcerors are cloaked and unrecognisable as humans, they demand that we confront a reality within ourselves and the world, microcosm and macrocosm, exculpate a more compelling truth than that to which we have hitherto born witness. But what happens when we go beyond the cave wall from which came the processions of game animals, lead in the dance by the theriomorphs. What happens when the forms themselves decay from hybridity into a black swarm of atoms, to bright stabs of light?

Bouschet and Hilbert have a dread task: how to survive in a topographic collision of a thousand plateaus. Rock and ice, the texts of embedded time, the great houses of records have abandoned any pretence of linearity, circularity, seasonality. Whilst Dante must go through hell to find the trapdoor that opens onto the lowest rung of heaven, the stability of any foundation is shown by the unflinching pressure of the lens as illusory. Hope is abandoned, as it must be, but despair is not the outcome, only a stage in the work. Bouschet and Hilbert have a more radical Satanic aim than a vision of loss.

Initiation is an ordeal, and by rights it must be. Behind the images is a cramped and painful practice, one of complete absorption and total presence. It is that force of will and attention that renders us down to a subatomic level; the obsession of the artists becomes our obsession.

In problematising the divisions between mineral, vegetable and animal life we are washed of daylight and experience a profound nigredo lit by the black sun of the subterranean caverns.
Scoured of our humanity, our species, our separation from the world of process an unexpected bliss arises, a sense of weightlessness. In the disorder is a beauty, won by rite of narrow passage and eclipse. The energy of Satan is revealed as the energy of the earth, the star matter, the endless creation of possibility through the destruction of order. We are made and unmade by the very process of liberation. Order is a temporary kingdom whose iron laws oxidise and fur into new zoetic forms.

Having been disassembled so utterly, new possibilities can be seen. Totems pullulate, birthed from the deeper reality of the cave. The balletic progression of the spider, the bat make themselves known. They do not come as familiars, but are disordered into planes, claws, spasms, tensions. We have the mineral vision, the virus vision of flowing ice detritus. We have abandoned our sense of judgement, of distaste, which has been found absent at the deepest level. It is not Satan who has been inverted but the central maxim of hermeticism. Our text now reads: as below, so above. The transition has been made to the world of sorcery, of aggressive agency and volition against the imposition of order. By choice we are nocturnal agents, and we can extend the invisible senses and go forth by night. Transvection has been made possible by our abandonment of the human and the complicity — or can we even say implicit pact — with these allies. What has been seen in such mysteries cannot be unseen. Such is the power of the artistic vision.

The anabasis, the ascent, is to a world built upon these secrets but in absolute denial of them. A world as city governed by the same flows but concealed beneath well-cut suits. These realities are seen in continuity, glimpsed from beneath the gratings and access points to the guts, the intestines and labyrinth of an hollow earth. Commuters endlessly descend, commuted beneath the streets into dangerous proximity with the infernal forces. There is a guillotine fall of elevators, a mill of revolving doors. The world of progress and commerce is surveilled, made accountable. If the germ of heat promises transformation and life in the underworld, the city too has consequences in the world of men, trading all our futures for short term gain.

One cannot apply a single reading to the work, that would be to defy its absolute virulence, the forces which are at once corrosive and transformative. What is at work here is, and can only be, accounted for in terms of sorcery. It flashes forth in the crescent sliver of solar eclipse, just as the city lights glare and scorch out the frame. It insists on the acceptance of an ecology that has not excised horror, an art that is both weapon and plague.

Ruling the City of London, the city as London, is the dragon. This is a troubling heraldry, as the dragon can only be Satan as demiurge. Viewed from the hollow earth, the world that contains the cosmic forces that made the stars, something has gone terribly wrong. The holy terror of a microcosmic world that is a throng of entities has been extracted and turned into absolutism.

The work deliberately juxtaposes, and, in doing so, introduces the vector of contagion as the profound secret of all existence. The world throngs with life, even as we witness the sixth mass extinction, the mass production of desire and the standardisation of those objects of desire as commodities and illusions. The pandemic rises from beneath the City through the secret passages that open into the bodies whose hubris proclaims them masters of the universe. A curse is worked, up from the belly of the earth and down from the catastrophe of the heavens answering in response. Here then is sorcery as art, it is art renewing itself as an occult practice through the placing of a deliberate curse, having rediscovered both necessity and mystery. Purpose is only ever found in the deep work of the abyss where few will ever venture; it is our place in the drama of existence and non-existence which the work of Bouschet and Hilbert initiate us into, in what is an unequalled and profoundly transformative gesamtkunstwerk. It is no longer a question of picking a side, ideology is absent, granting us a biopolitics whose theology is of a world inoculated with entities whose liberation is absolute and unstoppable.

– Peter Grey is a writer, and the co-founder of Scarlet Imprint. He is the author of The Red Goddess, which has
become the standard work on the goddess of Revelation. His Apocalyptic Witchcraft has been called the most important modern book on witchcraft, placing it in the mythico-poetic context of the Sabbat and in a landscape suffering climate and ecological collapse. His most recent work, Lucifer: Princeps, is a study of the origins of the figure of Lucifer. Further essays can be found in Howlings, Devoted, At the Crossroads and XVI.
His work has also appeared in numerous small journals and collections, such as The Fenris Wolf, as well as online. Peter Grey has spoken at public events and conferences in England, Scotland,Norway and the United States as well as closed gatherings. He is currently writing Lucifer:Praxis, and his collected essays with Alkistis Dimech will be published in The Brazen Vessel later this year.

FROM ONE WORLD TO ANOTHER
Founded by Enghien-les-Bains local council, the Centre des Arts is a multidisciplinary artistic space with a focus on digital creativity, and a platform where the arts and technology meet. This initiative has replenished the town’s creative reserves, giving artists the space needed to experiment and practice and bring to life the next chapter in the history of art.
For the latest season of creative ventures, the Centre des Arts joined forces with Kevin Muhlen, director of the Luxembourg Casino – Contemporary Art Forum, to collaborate on a selection of works that explore the concept of worlds within worlds. In these physical, mental, fictional and virtual spaces deprived of natural light, human beings are brought face-to-face with their deepest fears, entirely immersed in a new world populated by spirits and legend.
Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert have been working together since the nineties, using still photography and video to examine the principles of power and structure. Their recent work compares and contrasts the raw forces of nature with the (dys)functional properties of contemporary society. From deep within the vortex of the Anthropocene, Bouschet and Hilbert highlight the deeply-embedded and archaic relationships between geological forces and humankind. Cocytus Defrosted offers up a glimpse of a lake thawing – the lake once said to hold Lucifer captive in the frozen underbelly of Hell. The installation is a visual allegory, showing the gradual freeing of a “demon” released into a dissolving world.
Architect and artist Laura Mannelli reflects on the space that exists at the crossroads between physical and virtual realities. Her Promises of Monsters project and virtual-reality Near Dante Experience prologue embark on a Dantesque meandering through deep, dark worlds where light serves as the sole guide and vehicle. This physical, spiritual and symbolic light calls into question the discrepancies between our visual perception and our ability to truly see.
As above so below is an axiom taken directly from Antiquity’s alchemists and hermits, in which that above is mirrored below, the skies mirroring the earth, paradise mirroring hell, phenomena co-existing where semantic, scientific and cultural tradition would see them opposed. The concept takes the shape of a two-fold movement, a kind of symmetry, where that which is plunged to great depths is simultaneously elevated into the ether. This opens dialogue between these artists’ works and those from other authors such as Benjamin Bianciotto, Agnès de Cayeux, Peter Grey, Didier Ottaviani and Catherine Vidal, a continuation of their visual story-telling that provides a new vision of our world via deafening obscurity and blinding light.

Ethereally beautiful landscapes, entrancing music, heart-stopping movements that capture the imagination, an inner cry on the finiteness of life, disappearance and rebirth, and a prophecy that rattles the status quo to its very core: “From this collapse and momentum, a new world is born”. The opening scene of Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) instinctively echoes the works by Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert and Laura Mannelli, with the pieces merging in a collective commentary on the nature of collapse, new beginnings and anticipated repetition.

In his Heart of Glass, the German director hypnotised his actors in order to convey a sense of unsettling on-screen distance and a disturbing brand of uniqueness. This hypnotic theme also underpins the two proposed works in a dual-faceted experience: characters seem to meander in a daze in Near Dante Experience by Laura Mannelli and Gérard Hourbette1, close relatives of the semiconscious wanderers in Cocytus Defrosted by Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert. Mechanical and seemingly aimless, they appear to be guided by an invisible, external hand, emerging in contrast to the almost ecstatic state of hypnosis triggered by the images, by the concept of travel, by the feeling of a never-ending cycle or loop that offers up a glimpse of another potential place and time, a magical invitation to experience other worlds.

I. G. I. N. E. E. C. I.
A similar splitting effect is reiterated in the pieces offered up by our Luxembourgish artists. Virgil serves as the poet’s guide in Dante’s Inferno (1307-21), and is an enlightening benefactor in Near Dante Experience. He is the silent night watchman who sheds light on social and psychological breakdown in Cocytus Defrosted. He is said to be the brain behind the famous palindrome “In girum imus nocte ecce et consumimur igni” (“We whirl through the night and now are consumed by fire”), an evocative tag line for the two exhibitions that hints at the theme of alienation simmering below the surface of the works on display. The link continues with the (almost) eponymous film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1981) by Guy Debord, from the director’s ferocious lambasting of the destruction wreaked by western capitalism to the harshness of the black and white. Through this Inferno-inspired circular structure, the artists highlight our position at a turning point in history: the final apocalypse is nigh, and a great revelation on the horizon. Yet another turning point; perhaps the same as it ever was. We experience that strange, dizzying sensation: that all times and eras are alike, that humankind has always feared the monstrous, haemorrhaging growth of all-destroying progress, has always feared overpopulation and the death of our planet. The following words from the Old Testament spring to mind: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Except the sun itself has changed: a macabre, black sun, brimming with a desolate melancholy. A satanic sun, a disquieting omen of tragedy for all humankind. The sun that blinds modern vampires in their quest for immortality through reincarnation, a life beyond death. We are reminded of the magnificent bat sculpted in light from Cocytus Defrosted, cryptic messages, a tangled maze of shadow and light, of the nine Meta Wanderers in The Promises of Monsters, all powerful metaphors. Ultimately, the sun follows the curved path that leads it back to its eginnings, a geocentric ellipsis, from revered divinity to nothing more than a ball of flames delineated by scientific observation. Through pagan adoration, it is returned to its status as a higher entity, the role it plays in the ultimate destruction consolidated (acknowledgement of the impending ecological disaster). In its different incarnations, the sun shines through in both projects. We catch glimpses of it in symbolic eclipses in Cocytus Defrosted, and see it as the ultimate destination, an adored deity, in Near Dante Experience. The omnipresent contrast between the black and white, darkness and light, shadows and illumination found throughout the pieces forms the second symmetrical mirror effect. The artists have transformed Dante’s circles of hell (sinister revolving doors, circles of wandering souls) into spirals (possibly ascending), reworking discs into spheres.The music, too, is used as Andreï Tarkovski had hoped, fording the void between works perceived as small, self-contained worlds, interacting within a greater universe. Circles are unique in their ability to stimulate exchange between both top and bottom – as above so below – and to reshape the values we believe to be unmoveable. “Through the rotating motion of the sphere, the heavenly becomes earthly and inversely, hence the truth that gods become men and men become gods”2 in the words of Thomas Mann. The three artists subject time to the same process they use on space: squashing the temporal, shifting time on its axis. Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert fuse the palaeolithic and the contemporary, while Laura Mannelli intertwines mythology and future. As a new world dawns, these magicians have chosen inferno, the underworld, all circles of hell, as a mine from which trapped light may be extracted.

CAVERNOUS BODIES AND ICY ATMOSPHERES
What does hell look like? This question has confounded all human civilisations since the dawning of time itself. The ideas explored here perpetuate this longstanding ancestral tradition. For Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert, hell takes on a contemporary form in a continuation of the existentialist school of thought: a Parisian metro station that gobbles up lost souls, lifts that plunge human bodies deep into the belly of the Earth, formidable international financial centres guarded by terrifying dragons, the markers of a sick society enclosed within hellish structures and architectures. Yet it is the thawing of the Cocytus, the frozen prison that encloses Dante’s Satan, that best encapsulates the disaster currently at hand. The ice melt here is impossible to restrain, catastrophic mutations, terrifying disappearances, all hint at the threat of apocalypse that hovers somewhere in the near distance. Laura Mannelli, meanwhile, introduces us to Lucifer bathed in dazzling light. The Prince of Shadows remains beyond reach, a blood-curdling giant strangely contained within his virtual shell. He struggles to rise up towards the reassuring, liberating source of white light, where elsewhere we watch him fall like the morning star, interchangeable with Christ, mutating into a phantasmatic Venus, a spiral towards elevation. Once again, opposition and contrast bleed into one another: Lucifer embodies Satan, destructive and wrathful, the devil of the Old Testament with his accusations and attempts at temptation. Yet he also bears the light that gives Man his powers as a creator, a direct descendant of Man as a diabolical, romantic lover.Taken out of his religious (Christian) context, the Devil enables manipulation while retaining a powerfully referencerich and instant recognisability. he Devil instinctively speaks to our collective subconscious and evokes his historical context, both in and outside of art. By conjuring up images of a Lucifer soon to be released from his infernal kingdom, the artists inspire us to rethink our entire perception of the world we inhabit.

LOST INSIDE (AND I CANNOT HIDE)
Cavities, caverns and caves are explored and treated as central components in the concept of relationships between the internal and the external, the surface, ground level, earthly existence. Caves are where art and magic are born, the veil between the inside and the outside, the present moment and the Otherworld. Caves also embody the Platonic allegory, the idea of illusion and tricks of the mind, access to a higher state of being and the realm of ideas. The three artists chose to overhaul this theoretical approach, turning the underground into the centre of a bright new world in which fiction, appearance and obscurity are synonymous with truth and contact with the divine. Fire and shadow replace the sun, the polarised neon lighting of the screens shedding new light on the dematerialised. “A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways – by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light […] and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.”3. The high-impact contrast between black and white enhances this sense of moving beyond the visible world through its insinuated otherworldliness, yet later works to refocus our attentions. When Laura Mannelli links the conical cavity explored in Dante Alighieri’s poem to the cavities observed in the Beatrix 83 asteroid and behind the human eyes – our instrument of visual perception – she guides us towards looking deeper into the third eye. This internal eye, home to wisdom and extra-sensory knowledge, is hinted at in the work by Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert, who play with blurriness, distorting the elements (rain, drops) and unsettling obliques. These three masters of chaos are aligned in their use of visual disruption: Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert intervene to show us the incomprehensible matter that nevertheless constitutes our very being, the essence of humankind’s inner world reflected in the depths of the earth, while Laura Mannelli serves as an architect of the psyche, painting her landscapes in nebulous mist, lending voice to the light, showing us the way, translating the unknown. This meeting of mind and the outside world, the internal and the external, finds its ultimate expression in an off-kilter humankind, as reviled as it is revered.

THE HUMAN PHENOMENON
Deep inside a miraculous cavern, Near Dante Experience showcases anthropomorphic bodies imprisoned in rock. These creatures made of stone encapsulate Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theory in which Life is a progressive prolongation of Matter4. The themes underpinning Cocytus Defrosted explore this concept of the human body made from stardust. The concept of geology and biology fusing together to form a kind of trans- and post-humanism was developed by Dante Alighieri, consolidated by Laura Mannelli and expressed by Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert. Dematerialisation, whether through virtual reality or a melting away, is a paradoxical reminder that nothing escapes the laws of matter, whether simple metamorphosis, alchemical transmutation, or the decomposition of light and water. Monsters and cyborgs embody the same progress and use similar strategies, sounding devices lend music its physical dimension, the silhouettes and shadows that dance over the rock lead back to our founding archetypes. The medium used in painting (bone char, volcanic rock), the deep, hypnotic black and the levitating Black Stones tie together the ideas of black monoliths from outer space, the Kaaba and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), and through reflection, bring together monkey and astronaut, sorcerer and scientist. The implicit theme contained within the constant transformations showcased in these works is that of flow, exchange, perpetual movement that disturbs progress, evolution, linear time and the boundaries of space. Everything moves, disrupting our established codes, definitions and certainties. Ice melts into steam, fire flickers to a standstill, the relentless slows to a halt. Pipelines solidify liquid, wires break down communication, the immaterial can be read. The common vector that binds them stretches out in a continuation of existence, from Mother Earth to the body at one end, and from the body to its virtual dilution at the other. Yet it may still be possible to reverse the inevitable, in line with the concept of identity as being formed of an upper and lower part. Laura Mannelli examines the reconquering of the body, while Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert explore its disappearance.

LA DESTRUCTION FUT MA BÉATRICE
Art is tasked with unifying, serving as both the vehicle and destination for the journey embarked upon by our three explorers. Humanity shall find salvation through art and creativity, the only vessel capable of transporting humankind through immaculate Hell, leading us towards the light (whether white or black), elevating us to a position worthy of both our past and future. Yet the works on display do not take us on a journey for the sake of mere escapism. To the contrary, we are instead invited to take action by confronting reality. Inclusion, rather than disengagement, is the name of the game. Aesthetic action is used as incitement to revolution, political declarations for a return to the active practice of sorcery (Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert) and a call to rethink how we move forward along the path to improvement (Laura Mannelli). This rejection of the notion of boundariesand limits is expressed in how the images collide, losing us along the way and in doing so encouraging us to break free – under water, within networks, on Earth, and perhaps even in space – thanks to their ability to transcend the frontiers of the mind, rupturing with the known and leading to a glorious extrapolation of the Spirit. In this sense, all three artists share a heart of glass, enclosing both science and nature, physical mutation and liberating imagination. This heart of glass is an illustration of their twofold aim, a desire to reincorporate the geological and encourage genetic change. Ruby red, and where black and white converge.

– Benjamin Bianciotto, art historian, art critic and independent curator. He wrote his doctoral thesis supervised by Philippe Dagen at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, about Satan’s Figures in the contemporary art.

Yesterday I was wondering…
As Above So Below, on Earth as it is in heaven, like a perpetual ebb and flow moving between one and the other in an ontological drifting, a maelstrom of essence and meaning that leads us to the ‘in-between’, an illusion? Coming closer to the whole, seizing it to the point of losing oneself somewhere between the two. I imagine it as a cosmic dimension expressed by light. Light that helps me understand the world around me. Carrying me away in a corpus of visions that are sometimes invisible, at least to my naked eye. A form of expression that takes me far away, far away from everything. Looking for another place, outside of time and of myself, something that isn’t me but comes close to who I am, something dizzying, like a world within a world flooded in intense, blinding light that annihilates space. I am weightless.
Somewhere…
This return to the self, a sudden, frenetic desire to question the essence of things, throwing up essential, universal questions, was prompted by a very unexpected phenomenon: virtual reality.

Technological states of being, artificial and non-organic, not even alive. Inhuman?
Criticised for its dissimilarity with reality as we know it, our taste for it alienates us from ourselves. Yet it was through these virtual realities that I was able to change my perspective, consider new paradigms and regain control over my body and senses, through unexpected revelations on my own place in the world. I’ve always been obsessed by my complete inability, as an architect, to define what ‘space’ is, what ‘a space’ is, to the point that I ran out of words to describe it. By reduction, this led me to question the essence of everything.
The invisible fused with the visible.
I reconnected.
Our tendency to only imagine a single way of existing cuts us off from selfunderstanding. In your work, you write
that ” sorcery allows us to leave behind our human form and venture out into the unknown”. I’d like to take this sentence, out of context perhaps, and corroborate it with Dante’s ‘Trasumanar’. As it moves towards the heavens, the body vanishes in metamorphosis, the human gives way to the ultimate dimension. An unknown dimension.
Weightless. Somewhere…

A link back to sorcery that resonates powerfully through your words. A link that conditions our relationship to the world. It strikes me as simultaneously a point of convergence and friction. My tie to technology, a sometimes-naive relationship with science fiction, from which I borrow its traditional codes. Am I drifting away from the essential? From on high, in full light, confronted by the obscurity that brings us closer to ourselves. I think I read this somewhere in your writing… From below, deep in the heart of the abyss, in the crux of all earthly forces…what do you think? What is this power that lies dormant? What movement guides us?

Gast Bouschet, 31 May 2018

Yes, the light “helps us understand the world around us”. The world casts its reflection on the mind and this reflection is the raw material we use to contemplate and represent it. Vision may be our primary tool of thought, but I believe there are many ways of seeing. You are right to note that we are all seeking an “elsewhere”, we are called on to explore the far-flung depths that exist beyond our grasp of space (and time). What you describe as “a world within a world flooded in intense, blinding light that annihilates space” resonates with me, and paradoxically I feel very close to the way in which I respond to “darkness” and the mysteries of the universe. Space and time are abstract concepts that cannot help us grasp the mystery of cosmic existence. Indeed, “what is this power that lies dormant? What movement guides us?”.

These are questions that lie beyond what science is capable of teaching us. The answers to these questions are inevitably subjective and force us to stray from rationalism and begin to rediscover the brute force of imagination. The idea is not to reject scientific knowledge, but rather to tinge it with speculation. Science fiction is not a bad way of doing this. All self-respecting science fiction incorporates scientific knowledge with a little added extra, such as the concept of parallel universes, which is just another way of speculating on the origins of life, no worse a notion than any other. The best science fiction, like our ancestors’ wisdom, seems to spring from the depths of the abyss.

I don’t think it matters whether this abyss is filled with blinding light or the deepest black – the two probably mean the same, in the end. What matters is to move away from enlightened consciousness, and to begin exploring the mysteries of our cosmic existence. Art is undoubtedly the best way of achieving this.
As you know, I approach the question of existence from the perspective of a sorcerer. My practice is fundamentally chthonic, based on plunging to the depths of the underworld rather than elevating towards the heavens. I think it is important to note that amidst all this darkness we carry inside us, our path is lit by astral glyphs that arise from the dawn of time. If I may, I’d like to emphasise one aspect that the modern era seems to have forgotten. Everything in our environment is designed to reflect light and most people spend their entire lives in an atmosphere cast in cold, sterile light. By shutting out the darkness, we have bricked off the tunnel that would once have led to something that exists beyond. I’ve always been fascinated by cave paintings. Palaeolithic artists once clambered into the depths of the Earth, places where no light shone, to create their paintings and bring out these mythical creatures from the void.

To understand how new consciousnesses emerge, we might start by asking what pushed them to venture into these places starved of any natural light. It might be interesting to consider how our eyes respond when deprived of light. You have to consider that we see primarily with our brain and spirit. The eye is just organic matter, the eye doesn’t see, the person attached to the eye does. If you keep your eyes open in complete darkness, your vision is left to its own devices, and withdraws. Light deprivation acts like a descent into a hidden dimension, like a tunnel opening out onto a new, inwardlooking, subterranean vision. Our path is no longer lit by the sun as we know it, but rather by the “black sun”, the sun of the mystics and visionaries. Bataille said that “night is also a sun”.

Dante invented the word “Trasumanar”, and nobody can agree on a strict definition of the term. I don’t know if it expresses the cosmic destiny of our practice. Our goal is to surpass the human, but there is no “ultimate” aim in our art, rather we sense the idea of a permanent becoming, a continuous metamorphosis. We are living in highly apocalyptic times, apocalyptic in the sense of anticipating the end of the world, rather than in the etymological sense of a revelation. Nowadays, we refer to our era as the Anthropocene, a geological period characterised by human impact on the evolution of our planet. I wonder how you position your art and your thought process within the context of this era that seeks to redefine what it is to be human? Does your interest in science fiction stem from a desire to understand the fate of humanity? The metaphysics of the future? I feel we don’t consider how art might be useful often enough. It strikes me as essential that we shake things up and redefine our responsibilities. Why do we make art? What do we hope to achieve?

Laura Mannelli, 7 June 2018

There’s something that fascinates me in our exchange of “visions” and especially in your work. I took a little time to reply to you because I’ve been caught up in these ideas, which lead me into a state of reflection that escapes me. Which draws me in. I wanted to capture these thoughts, understand the “sorcerer’s approach”, but was unsure how to handle myself and attempt to embrace this new consciousness. Is it a process? Should I close my eyes? Certainly I should seek distance from artificial light. So many artifices. Is the idea to determine a set path? I needed to know.

And something you wrote to me caught my eye. It’s something I have often experienced for myself: “I keep my eyes open in complete darkness, my vision is left to its own devices, and withdraws. Light deprivation acts like a descent into a hidden dimension, like a tunnel opening out onto a new, inward-looking, subterranean vision.” It reminds me of the Dante quote: “When you look too far into the darkness, you may imagine, and lose your way”. Which I’d like to rewrite as: “When you look too far into the darkness, you may lose your way, and imagine”.

It is here, in this shadowy space, that I join you. And may answer your question. Imagination. “Rediscovering the brute force of imagination”. The world is something familiar, intimate, a well-meaning accomplice and proscription. I arrived at art almost by “serendipity”. Calculated chance. In my professional practice as an architect, “architecture” constrains and restricts, and what it contains is both an “object” and an object of thought. Such restricted space. Nothing left free to remain undefined, uncertain, no negative space. No room given over to the impalpable, the elements we all feel but cannot describe. Forgotten space, poor accomplices, heretopia. Other space. Fiction as its own, separate space. Its own dominion, our dominion. A self-standing place. A place of freedom. Room to breathe, a breath. Because it is there. Because it doesn’t need much. Because we are free to imagine, however little we may know. Because intuition often transforms into truth. Because even lies may find their place. Because monsters can also make promises. My respect for Donna Haraway is primarily about the respect she pays to fiction, according it as much worth as philosophy. Fiction is a necessity.

My deep interest in science fiction isn’t just about feeding my love of technology, it’s about exploring possibilities. An ability to step away from habit and indoctrination, changing your attitude and approach to take steps towards the other. Towards yourself. Fiction is designed to be narrated, like a universal language, an oral tradition, an incantation, a story. A story that each individual shapes for themselves. A story to be told. And in this space, our eyes may still only be organic matter, but our vision expands. To quote Donna Haraway, the boundary that separates science fiction from social reality is nothing more than anoptical illusion. Art “exists outside of time”. With this in mind, I’d like to redirect the question: can you give more details on how you practice your sorcery in such a specific context? If I wanted to start exploring it, where would you recommend I begin? With respect to optical illusions. What you describe fascinates me: “It might be interesting to consider how our eyes respond when deprived of light. You have to consider that we see primarily with our brain and spirit. The eye is just organic matter, the eye doesn’t see, the person attached to the eye does.” One of the quirks that immediately drew me to Divine Comedy is its overarching architecture.

I was surprised to learn that Divine Comedy’s architecture was inspired by the Islamic astrology of the times. The bottom of the cone where Lucifer resides is made from darkness and ice. There’s a parallel here with he back of the eye, the place where rays of light and the perspective of light are reversed. Purgatory and paradise: this is where the cone is reversed. It comes back to the idea of vision. In Islamic thought, hell is a frozen place. The deepest surface of the eye where images are captured is the “humor glacialis”, a dead eye, dead light must be passed through to reach living light. We might ask, “can our senses deceive us?”. This mechanism lies at the heart of virtual reality headsets. It makes us doubt what we believe to be true. Olivier Nannipieri, a lecturer at the University of Toulon, explains that our senses don’t deceive us, our interpretation of those senses does. The mistake is made by the mind. The brain decides what is real, and what is illusion. The brain begins playing tricks on us. If I look at Duchamp’s fountain, I see either a fountain or a urinal. Our brain chooses what to see. The distinction between the real and virtual doesn’t exist. Reality is more complex than that.

I’ll close with this example by Austrian-American architect, architecture theorist, theatre designer, artist and sculptor Frederick Kiesler. He’s one of my sources of inspiration in my work. He drew parallels between infinite space and vision. He said: “Form doesn’t follow function, function follows vision, and vision follows reality”. He used seeing machines to experiment his approaches, combining and crossreferencing them in “architectures of vision”. I thought that would be an interesting illustration to corroborate your ideas.
lA

Gast Bouschet, 10 June 2018

I think we have to embrace this consciousness in a personal way. I wouldn’t dare to offer a categoric definition of sorcery because words deform its true meaning. To my mind, it’s a practice that stems from an empathy with nature and the universe and results in individual empowerment that allows you to form your own reality rather than submit to the version imposed on us by big business and the media. Sorcery is the force that engages with the fundamental processes humans use to build and shape their realities. It’s a practice that empowers the disempowered. As a result, it is in its essence political, and thrives in the shadows and ambiguous spaces. Negative space would be a good example. The forgotten spaces you describe can operate as magical spaces if we use them as such.

Sorcery appropriates these independent temporary and permanent spaces to become active. That is its primary characteristic: it is naturally active. That’s what separates it from other artistic practices. Rather than simply observing and describing the world, it intervenes in the world and transforms it. Ultimately, it shifts our attentions from a human-centric attitude to a focus on the nonhuman. It’s a practice that allows us to shape the forces that lie within us, forces we can trace beyond our human boundaries. It identifies with the energy of the universe and the very essence of ourselves, matter that carries us into infinity. But these are just words, and to truly grasp sorcery you need to live it, extract yourself from the artificial binds of western society and explore life as it is, raw and bare. There’s no way of trussing up sorcery, it’s a practice based on learning through suffering and adversity.

PS: One of the most original and interesting investigations of sorcery (and sorcerers in particular) is by Deleuze and Guattari in their epic A Thousand Plateaus, and the chapter “1730 – Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming- Imperceptible” is particularly relevant in light of this discussion. I am not very “francophone”, so I wouldn’t be able to point you towards a good French summary of their ideas, but here’s an article in English: http://www.academia.edu/181993/_Memories_of_a_sorcerer_notes_on_Gilles_Deleuze-Felix_Guattari_Austin_Osman_Spare_and_Anomalous_Sorceries The part given over to D&G is interesting, perhaps less so the space given over to Austin Spare. You might find it of use.

Laura Mannelli, 13 June 2018

Dear Gast,
I read the article you linked to. I tried to understand it, although it wasn’t easy. I’m not a researcher. I’m not a writer, or a philosopher. But I like to think we’re all capable of feeling and that intuition grants us access to a type of consciousness perhaps best described as a certain kind of sensitivity. Can I suggest a final topic for us to discuss? I wanted to look at the idea of the human body and Dante’s conception of the soul’s multiple powers. A pack, a group? “You, sorcerers”.

Growing throngs, incalculable, exponential and multiple experiences. A powerful involution that shapes the external by revolutionising the internal? A single “body”. Visceral. The sum of the parts isn’t linear, but grows steadily. How does this body work? It remains a mystery. “You, sorcerers” – where are you? Development, transformation, metamorphosis, multiplicity, all shatter the notion of individuality. Show me a truly exceptional, abnormal individual. Or is that a way of dissolving the individual? An inexpressible experience, the force of which overturns ordinary perceptions. Perceiving the imperceptible. What affect do you create through your work?

Does it concern highly specific and unique individuation, particles that are not distinguishable in the same way as those governed by an organic body that is individuated in space? “Individuations that are very different from the well-formed subjects receiving them” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand). How then might we define this special form of individuation? Who are you addressing? In light of these discoveries: the human question preoccupies my mind. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, there is this idea of a kind of transmutation and metamorphosis of the body. The heavens are entirely separate, external to the natural world, reachable only by physical reason. This is the setting in which the phenomenon of Trasumanar occurs. Does this represent a transvaluation of the human? Do these “sorcerer’s” contemplations imply a negation of the body, and consequently, of the subject? Is there a bodily dimension to your work? These reflections, your work, naturally require the audience to experience a strange disconnect from their own bodies. How must the audience draw on their own experience of being human in order to appreciate your work?

Gast Bouschet, 14 June 2018

Dear Laura,
Thank you for committing yourself so much in these reflections. I think you are right to raise the issue of the importance of intuition in the concept of knowledge, and to emphasise the idea of sensitivity. I believe these are the greatest assets we have in navigating the choppy waters of our world and existence. If you allow me, before going into the questions you raise, I would like to emphasize the absolute mystery of life. Nobody knows where life comes from, and why some things live while others do not. Scientists talk of evolution and teach us that at some point in this evolution, life seems to have flourished spontaneously, as if by magic. This approach is astonishing, as scientists claim to be rational people, yet answer the question of how life came to be with something that feels strangely like magic, a sudden appearing act, an idea that is anything but rational. There are other theories (panpsychism, animism, hylozoism, etc.) that are not based on the founding idea that life appeared at a certain point in time, but that all matter is inherently alive. I think this belief is central to think and practice sorcery.

If everything is alive, in some way or another, and if all things differ only in the degree of their vitality, then we are potentially capable of communicating with all the beings and forces that inhabit our planet and universe. This realisation does nothing to clarify the mystery that surrounds us, but rather broadens our scope of action, and that of art, to include other forms of beings. I think the art of the future will be inherently sorcerous, and should strive to erase the human-made barriers erected between nature and culture to create alliances with non-human beings. The sorcerer, or the “exceptional individual” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, operates around these barriers, in the borderlands between the human and the non-human, life and death. The sorcerer exists in a world between worlds.

Perhaps that answers your question: sorcerers – where are you? As to “who are you addressing?”, this might be the question I have most often asked myself these past few years. Although art is based on the human world being infiltrated by a different world, positions of identification are constantly shifting. It’s as if there were a form of crosscontamination occurring between the species that populate these worlds.

What happens to our body and mind when we consciously open ourselves to non-human forces? Who is addressing us, and who do we seek to address through our art? These are questions to which I have no definitive answers. I think we need to experiment and stay open to the Other. The body is heavily called upon in our work. Most of the videos we will be showing during our collaborative exhibition were shot on the fringes of the Arctic. We have travelled a dozen times to this region, often in the winter, to discover the hidden life beneath glaciers or to confront seemingly endless snowstorms and the inhospitable silence of deep caves. A large part of the sequences were filmed after creeping into dark recesses beneath glacier tongues. Many times as I was filming, I watched as huge chunks of ice weighing several hundreds of kilos fell at my side. When you work in these conditions, you soon realise just how fragile we are. Nobody quite understands the effort it took, the long hours spent in these extreme conditions. Which is completely normal – what matters to the public are the videos themselves, not how they were made.

I do not know if our images are able to communicate the tension that was present during the realization of the work, and if the public will be able to identify with the forces at play. Our era is characterised by the intensely artificial means now used to produce images. Hollywood gives us the impression that everything is possible, and most people no longer believe that anything they see on the screen is in any way related to their own personal and physical experiences. I don’t know, ultimately, I suppose that people’s ability to identify with a particular phenomenon depends on their own degree of sensitivity. These sorcerous reflections do imply a transvaluation of the human, yes. Not just the human, in fact: everything. “Eine Umwertung aller Werte”, as Nietzsche said. Sorcery engages with matter at the thresholds of annihilation and disappearance but it does not negate the body. To the contrary, it uses the body as a lure to attract the daemonic and associate with it. By opening us up in such manner , or rather by being opened up so violently, a fascinating, hostile and unpredictable world is revealed to us.

We have to be aware of the risks. Going beyond human limits often invites daemonic consequences. Yet again, Nietzsche says it best: “Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein”. But we must also know that at the end of our lives, we will all be facing this Abgrund anyway. Sorcery is a state of consciousness that anticipates this common destiny. Every living thing must die and we must all confront our own death at a certain moment. What differentiates the sorcerer, and perhaps the exceptional individual as Deleuze and Guattari call him, is that he consciously identifies with the transformation, metamorphosis and multiplicity that shatters his notion of individuality. Unlike most people, he knows that this confrontation is the big challenge of his life.

Laura Mannelli, 18 June 2018

I think our discussion is having a profound effect on me. I feel a kind of positive contamination happening. And because such are the mysterious workings of life, I’m meeting sorcerers I never knew existed. A few hours before receiving your reply, I went to hear my friend and artist Florian Sumi talk. You mentioned scientists. For his Membrains exhibition at the CAC Brétigny in France, Florian Sumi sculpted 72 faces. A long line of silent presences, laid out to appear infinite. Gazing steadfastly ahead, their eyes embedded in the material, seemingly propagating their theories in silence. Scientists, sorcerers and witches rub shoulders, famous or unknown, and a handful of divinities. All consciously or intuitively manipulate magnetic fields, the energy that you could also call information exchange. To do so, they draw on their heightened awareness of the flows that run throughus, digital, organic, sensual, cellular and psychic lines of communication we use on a daily basis. Each applies their own intuitive, magical experiences of thought.

Could it be that whoever we are, we are all bound by the same hunger to know or invent our own life paradigm? That whatever the path, we all follow the same universal route? Or are there as many different paths as there are approaches to the world and experiences of thought? I read your letter, and your fascinating account of how you produced your work. It gave me a better understanding of the power that radiates from your videos. I think when you get to the stage of pouring so much of yourself into your work… It escapes us. It’s larger than us, it becomes fact. Clearly, when we respond to such a creative urge, an impulsion that overpowers us and pushes us to conquer our own limits, a little of the magic gets passed on.

I spent a long time hesitating before writing what I am about to share with you now. But when I imagined you in those circumstances, I thought back to a Hindu legend my mum told me when I was a little girl. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where exactly the tale comes from. But it tells of a time when all men were gods. Yet they abused their godly status to such an extent that Brahma, the master of the gods, decided to strip them of their divine power and hide it somewhere it would be impossible for them to find. The problem was choosing the right hiding place. When the minor gods were summoned to a council to resolve the problem, they suggested the following: “Let us bury Man’s divinity in the earth.” But Brahma replied: “That won’t be enough. Man will dig, and find it.” And so the gods suggested: “In that case, let us throw the divinity into the deepest of the oceans.” But Brahma shook his head. “Sooner or later, Man will explore the depths of all sea beds, and one day he will find it, and bring it back to the shore.” The minor gods concluded: “We don’t know where to hide it. There seems to be no place on Earth or at sea, no place at all that Man cannot someday reach.” And so Brahma said: “Here is what we shall do with Man’s divinity. Let us hide it deep within himself, as this is the only place he will not think to look.” According to the legend, from that point on, Man travelled around the world, searching far and wide, climbing, exploring, diving and digging to find the thing that lay within him all along.

I think virtual realities have a sorcerer’s grip on my soul. I feel as if I’m nourishing a multifaceted thought process through my human and non-human interactions, asynchronous exchanges, technological incantations. The result is a kind of polysemy. Sometimes, its meaning and essence slips out of reach. I belong with Gödel’s demons and insane philosophy. This logician and mathematician was incredibly insightful and gifted, and was known for his incompleteness theorems. He attempted to use a system of logic to prove the existence of living beings in parallel mathematical dimensions. Kurt Gödel believed in angels and demons. He believed the genius of mathematics was a gift from the angels. As a strong believer in the concept of gods, he also believed in the existence of something else, beyond the purely “mechanical” as the Turing machine would have us believe. Could there be an ideal world, perhaps a non-human world layered under our own? Somewhere between mathematics and metamathematics, this great thinker also believed in devils and the concept of evil. Perhaps this is what I’m looking for within these virtual realities.

Although I don’t like the term. It goes against nature. I prefer the idea of us having several degrees of reality. But since we’re discussing rational sciences… Algorithms are profoundly mathematical. I feel a kinship with Gödel. Was he crazy? In the broad sense of the term? Gödel’s research specifically concerns reason and its limits. Or more precisely, because Gödel was “fanatically rational”, the limits of calculated reason, and the unknown possibilities of intuitive reason. It makes me think about our own domain, the world of art. And the idea of a pack. And contagion. What fascinates me about the digital field is how it constitutes a form of openness to others. Which you mentioned. There’s a deep sense of sharing. I often quote Idriss Aberkane. This biomimetics theorist was inspired by his observations of natural ecosystems in imagining how humanity might develop in the future. He often opened his conferences with this anecdote. When you give someone €20, you lose €20 and the other person is €20 richer. If I share knowledge with someone, I don’t appear to lose that knowledge.

And the sum of our knowledge forms a third party. Creative processes, or simply contact with another, are always based on relationships with the other. I am very rarely creative alone. Of course, we each have our own urges and impulsions. But once this instinct connects with other forces, you never really know where you might end up. There’s a sense of magic to collaborating. The sorcerer’s pack? That’s understanding others, too. Considering the other, creating alongside them. An open and ever-changing system. And that’s why I could continue writing so much more. Perhaps it is a meeting of minds, to reiterate your quote: “Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein”.
Yours as ever
IA